It looks like they are doing things right, making the Community Edition (basically) a non-commercial Professional version, with everything included. Well done.
While a long time in coming, it’s a welcome move. Their competitors (mainly JetBrains and Microsoft, in the form of Visual Studio) both have done similar things for quite a while now, and so this is a wise competitive move.
I read this press release with great interest. Idera, Embarcadero’s parent company, is acquiring Whole Tomato Software, a producer of C++ Productivity tools. The interesting part here is that those tools are mainly part of Visual Studio, and appear to compete with the aforementioned JetBrains’ well known Resharper tool. The main tool, Virtual Assist, appears to focus more on C++ than C#, which I also find interesting. (I also love that their website appears to be written in Classic ASP.) After the Sencha purchase, this is an interesting expansion of their tools portfolio. I don’t think that this will affect RAD Studio too much. I do think it shows that Idera/Embarcadero is expanding their scope in the developer market and that while RAD Studio is the centerpiece of the portfolio, it is not the only piece.
Delphi continues to be a great tool for building apps for the Windows Store. But I have to ask — is anyone making any money on the Windows store? I mean, I don’t even know if I’ve ever been to the Windows store much less bought anything there. Fortunes have been made on the Android and iOS stores. Can the same be said of the Windows Store?
Times are good for web development in Delphi. This has traditionally been an area of development that has been a bit outside of Delphi’s bailiwick. I confess only a passing familarity with most of these frameworks, but they are nice to see. Here’s a quick look at the tools that are out there in the third-party market. It seems to be a good time to be a Web Developer for Delphi…
TMS has just release their TMS WebCore framework. This is the latest entry, and seems very interesting.
The open source contributor is the Delphi MVC Framework This project is very actively developed.
Not to be outdone, AtoZed Software is currently showing off their 17th version of Intraweb. It looks to be very different from their past offerings.